Introducing Wavelength

Every once in a while a MailChimp customer will ask me, "Hey, MailChimp’s been great for keeping in touch with my loyal customers. But is there any way to buy or rent an email list from you guys, so I can promote my business to potential customers in my area?" That’s when I explain to them the perils of purchased emails, and the virtues of organically growing a permission-based list. I also tell them they could just look around for other local merchants who might have newsletters (or similar publishers in their industry), then partner with them. In the back of my mind though, I’ve always dreamed of creating a tool for MailChimp customers to make that process easier.

That tool would analyze your list, then scour the vast database of MailChimp customers, looking for similar publishers to recommend. But this idea has been on the back burner for years, because such a tool would require 1) a vast database of MailChimp customers, and 2) the ability to analyze it–fast. Well, going freemium back in 2009 kinda helped with requirement #1. We’re at 1.2 million users, and manage over 800 million email subscribers for them all. And launching our Email Genome Project helped with requirement #2.

Helloooooo, serendipity. Finally, we have all the pieces we need to build Wavelength: a MailChimp service that uses a massive amount of email data to help you find publishers who share something in common with you:

Wavelength doesn’t help you send a promotion to another list, and it definitely doesn’t give you other lists or email addresses. It simply shows you screenshots of other newsletters that some of your subscribers read. The goal is to help you contact those publishers and maybe form a relationship with each other. Ideally, you can link to each other and help each other grow your lists organically.

How Wavelength Works

Basically, Wavelength analyzes your MailChimp list, then compares it to all other MailChimp lists (really, really fast). It looks for subscriber overlap, then recommends similar publishers by showing you screenshots of the email campaigns they’ve sent.

For example, let’s say I own a local pub, and I’d like to find some email newsletter publishers in town to partner with.

I’d go to Wavelength:

and authorize it to connect with my MailChimp account:

Wavelength will ask me which list to analyze, and it’ll ask for some descriptive tags for that list:

Then, it starts thinking:

It usually takes under 20 seconds to compare a list with about 1 million other lists containing 800 million emails.

And in order to deliver the results really fast, we pre-generated over 3 million campaign screenshots in the system (#NBD, as the kids tweet).

Once the analysis is complete, I get screenshots of email newsletters that my customers are also interested in.

They’re listed in order of "similarity" (subscriber overlap):

As one tester put it, this is where you meet all your "email cousins."

From here, I can drill down to see an archive of past campaigns by each publisher, and then subscribe to any of their lists.

See your subscribers, and maybe even yourself, in a new light

The example scenario above is very typical for what we’ve been finding in our initial tests. You’d think that other local pubs would be listed first, but you’re more likely to find local theaters, beer-related iPhone apps, local coffee shops, etc.

When I ran my various MailChimp lists through Wavelength, I expected to see mostly email marketing or design related results. Instead, I saw that my customers subscribe to newsletters about social marketing tools, CRMs, content management systems, productivity apps, design publications, and newsletters about company culture and innovation.

Here’s a snippet of my newsletter’s wavelength:

But what’s really fun is when I manage different lists in Wavelength, I get some different results. For example, we manage a list that talks about our various giveaways (t-shirts, monkey hats, plushies, etc) that I think is mostly composed of very loyal (and obviously very stylish) MailChimp fans, and the Wavelength for that list looks like this:

Yet another list I set up for an event we hosted in London had a Wavelength like this:

which actually gives me some ideas for other international events to sponsor.

When’s this available?

Update: Wavelength has been decommissioned

We plan to open up access to Wavelength in about a month. Why the wait? Well, it scans our system for what it perceives to be public email campaigns, and it makes an attempt to exclude any email campaigns that it thinks are "private" (I’ll explain what that means below). But instead of just relying on algorithms to tell us what to exclude, we thought it’d be good to let our customers manually exclude themselves. We want to give you plenty of time to do that.

Public vs. private email campaigns

MailChimp was built for email marketing, which is an inherently public activity. So what in the world should be considered a "private" campaign, and why would someone use MailChimp to send one?

Usually, it’s an internal company newsletter, or a wedding invitation, or a one-time prize notification or transactional kind of message. The information in the email is not usually super private or sensitive (email is just not an extremely private medium), but it might be something that you don’t exactly want promoted, or something with expired content. Wavelength will almost always exclude these, because it won’t search lists that were only imported manually, it won’t include tiny lists or fresh new lists, and it won’t show campaigns sent to a segment of a list. For a campaign to be shown in Wavelength, its recipient list must be greater than 200 members, and show signs of being public. Namely, opt-ins were received from its public signup form, or the campaign archive bar (that thingy with all the social sharing buttons) is activated.

But if you want, you can manually override everything, and totally exclude your list from Wavelength searches.

For example, I have my list where customers can sign up for a chance to win a t-shirt. For some reason, I just don’t want this to show up in Wavelength results. Maybe the t-shirt designs are top secret prototypes or something. For that list, I can go to "Publicity Settings:"

And then mark its campaigns as private:

You’ll notice that while we were at it, we combined two other previously released features that have publicity and privacy options (the archive toolbar and the subscriber count chiclets). We figured it’d be nice to consolidate everything in one place.

Using data to make email better

Wavelength is a project I’m happy to finally see the light of day, but we’ve only just begun. In 2011 we brought on a server/devops guy to help us handle all this "big data" and we hired an internal data scientist to analyze that data (here’s some fun stuff he’s found). We’re already heavily using EGP behind the scenes here to prevent abuse and protect the email ecosystem. For example, about a year ago, a hacker stole someone’s identity to create a MailChimp account, then used it to send spam (one reason we’ve added so many security features to MailChimp, and why we make free 2-factor security apps like AlterEgo). After that incident, we analyzed their list and found other accounts that had lists very closely matching the hacker’s:

The "evil doer" is in the center, with similar lists surrounding (users’ names obviously have been obfuscated). See any common theme here? What we found was fascinating. Some of the "similar" accounts were legit users, and some appeared to be accounts that the hackers were in the midst of setting up. But this kind of graph raises questions like, "Why are they all London arts / entertainment organizations? Did they initially steal their list from some London theater? Or did they all scrape their lists from the same source?" We’re also able to test incoming new accounts for the presence of stolen/purchased/scraped lists (based on data we’ve accumulated from accounts we’ve shut down for abuse), with the goal of keeping our system clean and our deliverability high (and also, you know–protecting email). And most exciting of all (to an email nerd like me), we can use what we’ve learned while fighting abuse to build cool new features like Wavelength that help us improve our email marketing. Who knew math could be so useful?

For general announcements about our Email Genome Project, subscribe here.

Now if I could partner with another publisher and suppress common subscribers from our two lists (so that their fans who are already our fans don’t get invited to become our fans). Of course, I could see some reasons why that might be a bad idea (by process of elimination they could see who our shared subscribers were).

Steven, So its definitely going to depend on the permissions that you (as the data controller) got from the individuals on your list. If you disclosed to individuals that you may process their data with third parties (i.e MailChimp) for research or other purposes then Wavelength should be fine. Now, if you are using MailChimp you should have already gotten some level of permission to have an individual’s data processed by MailChimp since MailChimp must process some list data in order to perform the function that you, as the user, have asked MailChimp to perform. So the short answer is users in the EU and UK need to take it on a case by case basis based on how they have collected their list data. If you have any concerns about whether you have the appropriate permission from the people on your list then you should speak with a local attorney familiar in the area of privacy law. If in doubt, you may wish to adjust your publicity settings to “not public” until you are sure that you are acting in the right.

Hi Valerie. Thanks for the reply – European data privacy and data protection laws are far higher that US laws. Specifically, in the EU the way you use data has to be clear, and my concern is that when customers sign-up they would never imagine that their details would be used to perform cross-database lookups with another company’s data. If anyone with EU (UK, German, Italian, etc) recipients in their list intends to use this, this usage of the data falls outside what is expected, so needs to be declared so that the customers can opt-in/opt-out.

WOW! This is fantastic! One question: I don’t get the sense that Wavelength addresses the issue mentioned in the opening paragraph–namely, buying or renting an email list from MC or another MC customer with a similar customer base. Does MC still condone buying or renting lists and prohibit it if the list is procured through a company discovered through Wavelength? The post mentions partnering with another company–what exactly does this mean if it doesn’t mean sharing email lists. Thanks for the clarifiation and AWESOME work!!

I don’t think the goal is to just share/give your list to like minded publishers. But rather to connect with the publishers and see how you can work together to promote one another to your opt-in lists.

Yes, I also would like more clarification. Is Mail Chimp going to share my list so that my recipients will then get mail from another company like mine, even though they never opted-in to that company’s list? What will the email say instead of “You are getting this email because you signed up to be on this list”

No lists or email addresses are shared or sold. That would be pretty evil. We just show screenshots of public campaigns, which helps you find publishers that you can contact and strike up a conversation with. You can’t send anything to someone’s list. That would also be evil.

Basically, I’ve walked down the street once and asked a local coffee shop to run a story in their newsletter about how my company is hiring. I just happened to know they had a nice newsletter, and their crowd matches our culture here at MailChimp. It worked out great. I paid them back by purchasing a bunch of big 5lb coffee bags for our office. There are probably a bunch of other local publishers I could do the same with, but w/out a tool like Wavelength, it’s hard to find them.

Ideally, you’d use Wavelength to discover a like-minded publisher. You’d sign up to their list to make sure you really like their content, and you’re truly like-minded. Then, you contact them and see if they’d place a link in their next newsletter to you (and vice versa). Nice and clean–no lists, email addresses, or bodily fluid are ever exchanged. :-)

Thanks for the clarification. We’ve been trying to do this, contact orgs who are publishing content similar to ours but most don’t seem to see value in the idea. I’m glad MailChimp is pushing the boundaries! Can’t wait to try Wavelength!
Jeffhttp://culture360.org

Sounds very interesting, but should it be something you need to opt-in for instead of something you need to opt-out of? I haven’t received an email announcement either. Seems like it should be made very clear that you need to change a setting if you want to keep your list out of Wavelength.

Thanks for keeping your customers informed about how you are continuing to make improvements in features and deliverability. I personally really appreciate the privacy options and the length of time you are providing for your customers to respond.

How do users OPT-OUT of having their campaign data analyzed? Seriously; my campaigns are mine and Mailchimp should not just assume my data is freely open to use in any analysis and especially not to share with other users, even in a screen shot. What’s stopping my marketing campaigns from landing into the “Wavelength” of my competitors?

Hi Todd, Even without wavelength, your competitors can see your email campaigns. All they have to do is sign up for your list. And if you have any social sharing links in your campaign, they’re already getting shared w/the public. Of course, if you actually turned off all public signup forms and you never, ever included any social sharing links in your campaigns, it’s pretty obvious you don’t want your campaign to be public–and that’s why Wavelength will automatically exclude your campaigns. I mentioned that in the article above, but I do realize the article is super long. In addition to the automatic exclusions we’ve built, we also provide you with a manual opt-out (which is also described above). It’s also worth noting we’re waiting 1 month before actually launching Wavelength, so you have time to go change your list publicity settings.

I get what you’re saying about the public side of your email lists – the campaigns are public and encourage sharing and there is output to the social networks from there that is public (Twitter) or semi-public (FB).

But email addresses are PII, and you are matching across all your lists for this PII. I don’t know, but this kind of targetting seems very wrong. I’m having a hard time articulating the scenario though.

Something like this I guess:

* I sign up with a list that says ‘we will never share your email address’
* list owner does not opt out of Wavelength, through ignorance or whatever
* my email address is *shared* (under the hood) with multiple other lists to find a campaign match

Hi Claran, your reading is *almost* correct, but you might be assuming that emails are displayed, or easily reversed-engineered or something. No email or PII is ever shared with anybody. You never get to see which email is subscribed to which newsletter. You just see that, “Hey, some of my readers seem to like that newsletter too.” And since Wavelength only looks at lists of 200 members or greater, even that insight is in aggregate.

At the risk of making this application sound less cool, this is a lot like using Amazon or iTunes, and then seeing, “People who bought this thingy also bought that thingy.”

These tools look useful for some lists, but when I went to check out the settings for my list, I was really dismayed to find that they had all been set up to default at the most public, open setting.

I understand that the more lists share with wavelength, the better you can recommend connections, but shouldn’t I have to opt IN to share all this important data that I worked hard to build for my business? After all, you require that I let my customers control their private information in relation to signing up for my list- shouldn’t you respect my information the same way?

Are you planning to create a system where a campaign can be sent to all lists, if I choose, without recipients receiving duplicates, and sometimes, more of the same message, or is the new ‘static segment’ the answer?

I have several lists and some people are on all of them. When I send a campaign, they end up getting the same campaign two or three times. Just wondering if you are working on synchronizing the list feature anytime soon.

Can you structure it so you have one list, but different “interest groups” that they can become members of? Then, when you send different emails, they can go to different interest groups separately. If that’s not something that would work, I’d love to hear your scenario.

Love this new feature! You chimps are smarter than most humans I know. ;-) I do hope that, in good form, you’ll present the publicity options reminder several times to list owners. You know… “tell them 7 times, so they hear it 3 times, and act on it once.”

One more note in agreement with MN. The default here should be excluded from Wavelength, and list owners should need to explicitly opt people in. The net result here is a decrease in trust; I shouldn’t need to keep an eye on service changes in order to maintain the level of list privacy I had yesterday. That’s just basic service operations.

I like the idea and could see myself using it, but a marketing person overreached here, and I’ll decline to for that reason.

Very cool service, inching us closer to transparency and mega cross-promotion. We like it and hope there aren’t privacy backlashes. Hope you’ve sent email to general users to explain ‘private’ isn’t the default setting. (Or, is it? Wasn’t clear.) Thanks!

Private is default for email campaigns that are not obviously public. If you send campaigns to a (large enough) list where you have social sharing, public signup forms, and other “public signals” activated, your campaigns are included in Wavelength search results. Campaigns sent to segmented/targeted lists, tiny lists, lists that are only imported, and other instances where it’s obviously not meant for the general public are excluded from Wavelength. Above all else, users can manually override everything and set to private.

I sure think this new system could be usefull. I believe our list will top 200 very soon and would love to use this tool. I’m hoping the screen shots will be alt tagged in such a way that they will be usefull to a blind person using a text to speech screen reader. In so many areas of the tech’s leading edge, we’re being left behind and believe it or not, we need to use Email lists too, and some of us are marketers.

Amazing! You outdo yourselves again. I’m always raving to anyone who’ll listen about how great mailchimp is. Anyone would think I do PR for you. Thanks for another great idea and addition to our businesses.

Eep! You guys have done it again. We’re a firm believer that Email Marketing is an integral part of building a successful Online Enterprise and we’ve been doing it for year. MailChimp is our preferred software for this and we probably get you one new member a month, at least. Keep eeping, and we’ll keep tweaking.

“Private is default for email campaigns that are not obviously public. If you send campaigns to a (large enough) list where you have social sharing, public signup forms, and other “public signals” activated, your campaigns are included in Wavelength search results. Campaigns sent to segmented/targeted lists, tiny lists, lists that are only imported, and other instances where it’s obviously not meant for the general public are excluded from Wavelength. Above all else, users can manually override everything and set to private.”

You stated the above and MY stuff would fall into that category. I agree this should be defaulted to “opt out” instead of “opt in”. I am not computer savvy in any way, and I don’t want to have the burden of keeping up with service changes to keep my list protected. It is a trust issue between me and my customers and I do not want to create any illusion of mistrust.

What the heck? I get an email saying Wavelength is ready, I click the “Try Wavelength here” link, login with my mailchimp account and get an error message that my account is “too new”, but if I have an older account I should use that?? I’ve been a paying mailchimp customer for 2 years, what gives?!

Hi Will, I’m sorry you’re having troubles getting to that page. I just double-checked and clicking on the details button should take you to http://wavelength.mailchimpapp.com/ but you can obviously go there directly. Click on “Connect List” and provide your user name and password and you should be all set. If you’re still not seeing it, the support chimps over at http://mailchimp.com/support can help you through the process.

Hi Bob, The amount of data required for Wavelength is enormous so it’s not updated live. It is possible that you’ll be included in this next update which I’m told should be happening soon. Additionally, if your list is very small or you’ve only sent a few campaigns, the data footprint may not be large enough to be included in this process.

I want to provide a pdf to people after they sign up for it. Can I do that? The email, including the attached pdf, would get sent to only that single person who signed up for it. How do I do that? Thanks in advance for the help.

Hi Gregg, There’s a couple options but in your case I think it’d be easiest to add a link to the pdf in a customized version of the “Final Welcome” email. We actually have a short article and video here: http://eepurl.com/gYZQ that describes the process and we’ll even host the file for you. We don’t allow attachments for a variety of reasons, but it has a lot to do with deliverability and ISPs watching out for the safety of their users as well. If you’d like to get a few more details you can read more about it here: http://eepurl.com/gYYX